During the past 20 years, the continued evolution of computer processors, data-storage devices and subsystems, and networking, together with the emergence of the World Wide Web and broad consumer acceptance of the Internet, have created a vast new Internet-based retailing infrastructure that represents a significant portion of current retail transactions for products and services. In certain retail sectors, including books and recorded music, Internet-based retail transactions now rival or have surpassed traditional retailing media, including physical retail establishments and catalog-based mail-order and telephone transactions. It is expected that Internet-based retailing will continue to grow and assume increasingly greater shares of the total retail-transaction volumes on a worldwide basis.
As Internet-based retailing of products and services has evolved and increased in market share, a variety of new support industries have grown up around Internet-based retailing, including cloud computing, website-development services, Internet-transaction services, automated testing and optimization services, and web-analytics services. Automated testing and optimization services provide tools and infrastructure to allow owners and managers of websites to carry out experiments in which websites are systematically altered in order to determine salient features and characteristics of websites and modify the salient features and characteristics to improve website performance.
In many automated testing systems, it is either impossible or difficult and imprecise to track a particular user's information-access activities with respect to websites and other types of remotely accessible information as the user's computational context changes, due to intended and unintended navigation by the user through various programs, sessions, and contexts as the user interacts with one or more processor-controlled devices to access websites and other types of remotely accessible information. As a result, many currently available automated testing and optimization services and web-analytics services cannot reconstruct continuous threads of user activities from collected data. Those who perform testing, optimization, and/or analysis, as well as those for whom testing, optimization, and/or analysis is performed, continue to seek testing, optimization, and/or analysis methods and systems that provide more useful information with regard to web-site users' activities.